First day of running completed

Nico Rosberg finished his first day of running as a works Mercedes driver with the fastest time ahead of former world champion Lewis Hamilton and his illustrious teammate Michael Schumacher. Schumacher is making his return to the sport after a three year absence and struggled at times during the early running to reacclimatise to the rigours of a Grand Prix weekend. He ended the day 0.5 seconds behind his teammate after struggling with a handling imbalance in the morning session. Rosberg has been in the shadows of his team since Schumacher announced that he was coming out of retirement but shone in the afternoon session with a series of blistering laps before settling down into longer stints to work on his race setup.

Hamilton suffered from severe tyre wear of the harder compound in the afternoon session and this may become an issue for the Englishman during the race which may necessitate an additional pitstop. He can be satisfied though to have outpaced his new teammate and reigning world champion Jenson Button who was fourth fastest after his days running as a McLaren driver. Red Bull and Sebastian Vettel are supposedly the favourites for this seasons championship after finishing as runner ups last season but the German struggled badly with understeer and had numerous off track excursions but managed to set the fifth fastest time. His day was a struggle but one that was better than his teammate Mark Webber who lost all of the afternoon running with a driveshaft failure.

Ferrari concentrated on long stints to get the car setup efficiently for the race and seemed to be very competitive in comparison to competitors when this is taken into account. Felipe Massa showed no ill effects of his crash last season to end the day in seventh one second off the pace. Double world champion Fernando Alonso was a 0.5 seconds further back but the Ferrari’s ran at a similar pace to one another until Massa’s last lap. The race pace of these cars will be a worry for their rivals as the tyre wear that was an issue for Hamilton and Vettel was of concern to the Ferrari’s.

Outside of the main challengers rookies Nico Hülkenberg was a surprising sixth and Vitaly Petrov eighth for Williams and Renault. The other notable additions to the grid are the new teams. Lotus and Virgin managed to get solid running under their belts throughout the day with Heikki Kovalainen the fastest of the new teams runners. Bringing up the year unsurprisingly was the Hispania team whose car hadn’t turned a wheel prior to todays running. They only managed to get one car on track today with Bruno Senna twelve seconds off the pace. His teammate Karun Chandhok will get his first taste of the car tomorrow but he will surely have a baptism of fire with little running before qualifying begins.